Part One of three.
Psychology dates back at least to ancient Egypt and Greece. As a proper discipline of study it remained under the umbrella of philosophy until 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first institution devoted exclusively to psychological research. The new field of science quickly became all the rage in Europe. Contrasting schools of psychology emerged in 1880’s with Sigmund Freud undertaking his pioneering research beginning in the 1890’s.
Friedrich Nietzsche began dabbling in psychology as early as the late-1860’s. As this blog attests, there are many avenues to Nietzsche’s philosophy. One of them is definitely psychological in nature. Psychology is, in fact, fundamental to Nietzsche’s philosophy. You cannot understand Nietzsche without understanding his perspectives on this subject. I am beginning 2020 with a series of posts devoted to Nietzsche’s view of human psychology, which, I believe, is a useful tool in self-understanding and continues to be relevant today.
In Beyond Good and Evil (1885) Nietzsche writes: “…once your ship has strayed onto this course: Well then! All right! Grit your teeth bravely! Open your eyes! Keep your hand at the helm! – we are going to be traveling beyond morality, and by daring to travel there we may in the process stifle or crush whatever remnant of morality we have left – but what of we matter! Never yet has a deeper world of insight been opened to bold travelers and adventurers; and the psychologist who makes this kind of ‘sacrifice’ may demand at least that psychology be recognized once again as queen of the sciences, which other sciences exist to serve and anticipate. For psychology has once again become the way to basic issues.” (BGE 23, Faber translation)
What is this “course” upon which our “ship” has supposedly “strayed”? What is this “deeper world of insight” taking us beyond good and evil? Nietzsche answers this earlier in BGE 23. Using his emphasis, it is the “evolutionary theory of the will to power.” By this he means: “A real physio-psychology must struggle with the unconscious resistances in the heart of the researcher, the ‘heart’ is working against it; a conscience that is still strong and hearty will be distressed and annoyed even by a theory of the reciprocal conditionality of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ instincts, which seems to be a kind of subtle immorality – and even more by a theory of the derivation of all good drives from bad ones.”
Thus Nietzsche places his theory of “drives” (as well as his concept of “morality”) at the heart of his psychological project, the “deeper insight” (revaluing morality) being rather disorienting. “But granted that a person takes the emotions of hatred, envy, greed, power hunger as conditions for living, crucial and fundamental to the universal economy of life and therefore in need of intensifying if life is to be intensified, he is also a person who suffers from such an orientation in judgment as if he were seasick.” (BGE 23)
So it is in spite of this “seasickness” that we must “keep our hand on the helm” and sail into a new and intense affirmation of life. A significant portion of this initial disorientation comes from the sheer novelty of going “beyond” traditional morality and redefining what is “good” and what is “evil”; but equally as disquieting is understanding the full nature of the “drives” themselves. From BGE 19, Nietzsche writes of “a multiplicity of feelings” deep within us calling the basic concept of who we are into question as revealed through the act of willing.
“…the will is not merely a complex of feelings and thoughts, is it above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of command. What is called ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the emotion of superiority felt towards the one who must obey: ‘I am free, “he” must obey.’ This consciousness lies in every will, as does also a tense alertness, a direct gaze concentrated on one thing alone, an unconditional assessment that ‘now we must have this and nothing else’, an inner certainty that obedience will follow, and everything else that goes along with the condition of giving commands. A person who wills: this person is commanding a Something in himself that obeys, or that he thinks is obeying.
“But let us now consider the strangest thing about the will, about this multifarious thing that the common people call by one word alone. In any given case, we both command and obey, when we obey we know feelings of coercion, pressure, oppression, resistance, and agitation that begin immediately after the act of will. On the other hand, we are in the habit of ignoring or overlooking division by means of the synthetic concept ’I’. Thus, a whole series of erroneous conclusions and therefore of false assessments of the will itself has been appended to willing in such a way that the person who wills now believes with complete faith that willing is enough for action…Thus the person willing adds to his pleasurable feeling as commander the pleasurable feelings of the successful executing instrument, the serviceable ‘underwill’ or under soul (our body after all is nothing but a social structure of many souls).” (BGE 19)
Nietzsche’s psychology is simultaneously a call to intimate authenticity by addressing yourself directly, “sailing beyond” the constraints of cultural approval, AND coming to terms with the fact that you are not one constant thing but, rather, a “multiplicity” of drives, “a multifarious thing.” In the section above, Nietzsche is particularly interested in how the drives express the will to power by competing and dominating one another. A person who ascertains their unique values as expressed by the naturally dominant drive or drives is a person who has taken a step closer to bringing order to their drives which, in turn, is essential for living a healthy life of affirmation. That is the destination where Nietzsche ultimately arrives.
Although, for reasons I have previously stated, I hesitate to place a lot of weight on writings in Nietzsche’s Nachlass (volumes of notebooks, including the collection of notes known as The Will to Power), this note seems clarifying with specific respect to the theory of drives: “The I is not the attitude of one being to several (drives, thoughts, etc.) but the ego is a plurality of personlike forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world….Within ourselves we can also be egotistic or altruistic, hard-hearted, magnanimous, just, lenient, insincere, can cause pain or give pleasure: as such drives are in conflict, the feeling of the I is always strongest where the preponderance is.” (1880 note quoted by Parkes (1994), page 292; the first emphasis is by Parkes)
According to Thiele (1990), “In the spring of 1868, before the appearance of any of his philosophical works, Nietzsche wrote: ‘The concept of the whole does not lie in things, but in us. These unities that we name organisms are but again multiplicities. There are in reality no individuals, moreover individuals and organisms are nothing but abstractions’ (General Works, 1:414) He maintained this thesis throughout his life. The human being, the body, the soul, the subject, the individual, was proposed as a multiplicity. A note written in 1885 reads: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general?...My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity’ (WP 270).” (page 51)
What are these drives and how exactly do they work? Katsafanas (2016) offers several insights into the Nietzschean concept of the self as a multiplicity of drives. “Nietzsche argues that human beings possess drives expressed in 'hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction' (GM II.16)...drives have a definite quantity of force, and this force cannot be straightforwardly eliminated, but only restrained and redirected.” (page 57) It is important to note that you and I can act upon our otherwise “automated,” largely unconscious multiplicity. We can “restrain and redirect” certain drives which allows for, as we will see, “a well-ordered soul.”
Drives are active within you, independent of you to the extent that “you” would not exist without drives. A given drive is has its own, independent initiative and criteria for action: “...drives evaluate and interpret. For the affective orientation induced by a drive can be understood as an evaluative orientation.” (page 94) “Drives are not simply responses to external stimuli; on the contrary, drives seek to manifest themselves.” (page 99) Importantly here is the fact that drives are aggressive forces that produce “affects.” This becomes critical deeper into Nietzsche’s psychology.
“Drives need not be constant in the literal sense of being active at each moment; rather, they are constant in the sense that they arise, with some regularity, throughout the individual's life.” (page 100) “Drives are independent of external stimuli, and, once they have become active, they will seek discharge...Nietzsche tells us that the drive will seek outlets, seek objects on which to vent itself.” (page 101) Here you can see the mechanics of flux within the multiplicity (each drive independently seeks expression and dominance) as well as the single-minded nature of each drive.
“The aim of the drive is its characteristic form of activity. The sexual drive aims at sexual activity, the aggressive drive aims at aggressive activity. In order for a drive to be expressed, one needs an object. The drive itself is indifferent to the object; the drive simply seeks expression. So the aggressive drive will seek to vent itself on whatever object happens to be present...If an appropriate object is not present, the drive will seek expression on whatever object happens to be present.” (page 101) If denied a route of expression, a drive will find an alternate route to express itself. So drives do not necessarily manifest the same way every time, which further complicates understanding them.
“...when a drive is active it will induce a particular kind of orientation; it will induce an orientation that inclines the agent to take steps toward fulfilling the drive, by making it appear as if taking these steps is warranted by the situation at hand...a drive manifests itself by impacting the agent's rational capacities. And with that, we can begin to see something interesting: being moved by a drive and being moved by conscious thought are not distinct processes. Drives can move us by directing and influencing our conscious thought.” (page 103) Though drives are mostly unconscious, our conscious decisions are usually drives expressing themselves. Got that? The multiplicity of drives messes with your life, for better or for worse.
“Nietzsche claims that our actions are the products of a chaotic mix of largely non-conscious desires and drives. Our conscious thoughts are casually important, buffeted about by forces that we neither discern nor understand. Appearances of self-conscious decision are illusory or causally inert, mere symptoms of hidden processes. Thus, Nietzsche claims that when an agent decides to do something, the agent is analogous to a boat 'following the current.' which '”wills' to go that way because it – must’ (GS 360).” (page 135)
Our behavior is always a manifestation of our dominant drive(s). For Nietzschean psychology, you have very little autonomy from your inner drives. But it is possible to understand them better and to take greater control over them. Not everyone is capable of this and, for many, their drives control them all their lives (which is why it is possible for algorithms to predict and control consumer behavior). But for others, the “free spirits,” “Ubermensch” (overmen) and “higher” persons of “the future,” it is possible to apply your understanding of your drives in such a way as to “orchestrate” and/or “command” them to the affirmative benefit of your life.
So, your behavior is an expression of your most dominant drives. Put another way, your misery in life is at the discord of multiple dominant drives that won’t cooperate. The hierarchy at which this inner order or chaos expresses itself is unlike anything else in the world, but it is most like human politics. Drives dominate or cooperate in a relationship that most resembles a political order.
According to Clark and Dudrick (2012): “The dominant drives in the political order of drives – those that have the authority to speak for the whole commonwealth – command. These are the drives whose high political ranking constitutes a person’s most basic commitments. The obeying drives are those that carry out the command, the dispositions to basic actions, we might say, as well perhaps as the subversive drives that tempt the person away from acting on her values…Nietzsche’s equation of ‘underwills’ and ‘under-souls’ implies that the will is the soul. Because […] Nietzsche takes the soul to be the ‘political structure of drives and affects’ (BGE 12), a structure of legitimacy and authority, not simply strength, this confirms […] that the parts of the will are the drives and that structure that allows them to form the will is political.” (page 188)
“The upshot is that to have freedom of the will is to be a well-constructed and happy commonwealth of drives, one in which the drives with political authority command and are obeyed by the drives that actually do the work. The politically superior drives rightly take credit for the work done by the other drives, because it would not have been done in the circumstances if they had commanded it.” (page 189)
While there is a “political order to the drives” there is also a “commonwealth.” So not only must certain drives (at times, remember the multiplicity is in near constant flux) dominate all others but they must (at times) work together, forming, if you will, “alliances” where several drives might work in unison to control all the others. This should not imply any sort of inner “harmony,” however. For Nietzsche’s psychology, harmony or even “inner peace” is not a desired psychological goal. Quite the opposite, actually. This is an excellent example of essential Nietzsche revaluation of a “value.”
Katsafanas writes: “Nietzsche tells us that some agents are disunified loci of forces, whereas other agents are unified. Thus, Nietzsche argues that agents are typically multiple and fragmented. He notes that 'human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest' (BGE 224).” (page 168)
The drives, even when one or more dominate, remain dynamic and in need of constant vigilance (for “higher” persons who are even capable of this). In Nietzsche’s psychology, you do not “discover” who you are, rather you discover how you are and the “who” emerges from this inquiry itself. This is what Nietzsche intended with his expression “Become Who You Are.” This means we should develop routine habits of monitoring our behavior down to the mundane level. Untended (unobserved) drives are like uncultivated fields. They are soon overgrown with useless weeds and bear little harvest. Undesirable drives that go untended can become "monsters" due to their unchecked bid for power.
In “The Wanderer and His Shadow” addition (1880) to Human, All Too Human (1878) Nietzsche writes: “Through the neglect of the small facts, through lack of self-observation and observation of those who are to be brought up, it is you yourselves who first allowed the passions to develop into such monsters that you are overcome by fear at the word ‘passion’! It is up to you, as it is up to us, to /take from/ the passions their terrible character and thus prevent them from becoming devastating torrents.” (WS 37)
Just as important, a drive that achieves dominance is never satiated, which is one reason we so often seem unfulfilled by our achievements or consumption of our desires. Katsafanas again: “The drive is not satisfied by the attainment of its object; rather, the drive motivates us to continue expressing its characteristic form of activity. So our actions don't have the motivational structure that we expect. We think we seek determinate ends and will be satisfied by their attainment; instead, we seek only processes of drive-expression and find attainment of ends at best temporarily satisfying.” (page 258) (As an aside, this is actually an excellent summary of Emptiness as well.)
Inner peace is simply a temporary effect (psychologically an “affect”) and always fleeting in “higher” individuals because the true goal is not “self-realization.” Rather, it is to attain a constant state of “becoming.” “Become who you are” is a perpetual process given the ever fluctuating nature of the multiplicity. While a “higher” person may experience inner harmony just as so many “lower” persons do, the experience itself has little to do with true happiness and is useful only to the extent that it allows the individual to flourish according to their orchestrated values. In addition to being a multiplicity, Nietzsche’s psychology sees “modern souls” as existing in a state of chaos.
In BGE 224, it seems as if Nietzsche could be describing today’s world: “…this historical sense, which we Europeans claim as if it were distinctively ours, has come at the result of an enchanting, mad /semi-barbarity/ into which Europe has been plunged by the democratic intermingling of classes and races – only the nineteenth century knows this sense, our sixth sense. Because of such mixing, our ‘modern souls’ are now infused with the past history of every form and way of life, with cultures that previously existed separately close by one another or on top of one another – our instincts are now running backwards in every direction, we are ourselves a kind of chaos.”
Note that the chaos is not necessarily natural to us. In the sense just articulated, chaos is only brought about by the democratization of European society. Admittedly, this is a rather naïve and antiquated thing for Nietzsche to refer to, but he was mostly a man of time even if he was far ahead of his time in some ways. Nietzsche detested democracy, the rule of “the herd.” It only leads to mass resentment and increases the power of those who are most resentful. Witness our current state of democracy and I think you will see that he is correct as far as that goes. Nietzsche felt that this resentment was a source of nihilistic decay and decadence in society and it was a social system that needed to be overcome. But that is not our topic here. Suffice it to say that it could just as easily be social media and the internet, for example, creating so much chaos today as democracy did to 19th century values.
In terms of his psychology we need only to be concerned with our internal “chaos” in relation to the dominance and alliances of the political order of drives. The workings of our psychology are not “democratic” at all. Rather, they are a seething multiplicity of complementing and competing drives, which are not equal or fair or just or even unfair or unjust. Drives are basically neutral, each one just wants to fully express itself. Drives don’t “try” to “cause” anything. Their only goal is expression, that’s all. Judgments of “motive” or “intent” do not apply to drives. One of Nietzsche’s major points is that the brain does not naturally “act” morally at all. Each drive strives for power in its own way. All drives seek privilege. The chaos of “modern souls” is curable, however, through a healthy political order of drives.
Another characteristic of the “higher” persons in Nietzsche’s psychology is that they are passionate and intense people. Their drives are often ravenous and competitive. Commanding or orchestrating them requires great skill and strength of character. It may have some “romanticism” in it, since Nietzsche was a man of the Romantic Era, but the more passionate the person (the multiplicity), the greater the potential for becoming. Life is meant to be lived intensely, not laid back (another revaluation). This means different things to different multiplicities, of course. For some it would be sexually. But for others it will be intellectually, or religiously, or you name it.
In Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche writes about the “vehemence” (intensity) of certain drives within each of us. Recall that first one, then another drive will dominate or form alliances with other varying drives, hopefully but not necessarily under your control. “…that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power…What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us: whether it be a drive to restfulness, of the fear of disgrace and evil consequences, or love. While ‘we’ believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about another…” (D 109)
Quite clearly, Nietzsche (agreeing with Buddhist teaching and the findings of recent neuroscience) discerns that the self (what we call “I”) is “a synthetic concept,” an illusion, a fiction – it does not exist as a fixed, singular agent. In the passage just quoted Nietzsche refers to himself and to the reader as each being a “we.” You and I are not “somebody” but rather a multitude of drives, each competing (and “complaining”) with the others as they jockey for dominance, which is to say the expression of your authentic values, your behavior in the world.
Drives are innumerable. But Nietzsche wrote of several (without claiming to name them all). In his writings he mentions the art drive, truth drive, value drive, aggression drive, sex drive (the most obvious one), cruelty drive, possession drive, power drive, creation drive, and knowledge drive. Essentially, drives are the behaviors and characteristics of human behavior in their entirety. You could easily pick out others, the consumption drive, clean drive, symmetry drive, pleasure drive, optimistic drive, melancholy drive, etc.
After we understand generally what drives are and why they literally constitute each of us, the next things to appreciate about Nietzsche’s psychology are that 1) bringing order to the drives is, indeed, a political process between the drives themselves and that 2) the collection of drives compose the human soul. Nietzsche declared “God is dead” but, ironically again, he nevertheless welcomed the idea of a human “soul” as useful, with a twist, of course.
“One should not get rid of ‘the soul,’ Nietzsche insisted, for it is ‘one of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses.’ ‘But the road to new forms and refinements of the soul-hypothesis stands open’ and invites ‘such conceptions as “mortal soul” and “soul as multiplicity of subject’ and ‘soul as social structure of the drives and emotions’” (BGE 12). Here Nietzsche revealed the speculative core of his philosophical enterprise. Not unlike Plato, we would clothe his philosophy in personal attire. For the language that best facilitates the description and analysis of the soul is political. The world of politics serves as a conceptual and terminological resource of the ‘reader of souls.’ Nietzsche observed that organization, cooperation, and patterns of domination – in short, politics – allowed pluralities to bear the appearance of unities (WP 303).” (Thiele, page 52)
This defines the general nature of the chaos and how it can be orchestrated into some sort of unity. This unity is basically who we think we are. “The multiple soul is a conglomerate of passions, desires, affects, forces, feelings, emotions, drives, and instincts. In turn, these variously named molecules of human motivation coalesced to form dispositions or character. Still, Nietzsche did not pretend to have discovered or explained the atomic structure of the human soul. He claimed only to observe its effects.” (page 54) That behavioral effects (“affects”) are observable is, once again, a major point, as I will show.
Nietzsche’s psychology is fundamentally about “bringing order out of chaos” to paraphrase one of his more famous quotes. You are a multiplicity of complementing and competing drives and you must master them into a political order of dominance when necessary and alliance when necessary. Otherwise, you will be mastered by them in a chaos of aggressive, uncontrolled drives.
The vast majority of people (“the herd”) are incapable of mastering their drives or even noticing them with sufficient awareness. They are clueless and their drives run amuck, exploitable, for example, by Function (making consumerism possible, for example). Only “higher” individuals can master their drives. Self-mastery is not only about figuring out your drives (your ambitions, desires, passions), it is equally knowing how to orchestrate the drives into a hierarchy that most resembles a political order of dominance and cooperation, knowing when to allow one drive to assert itself and when to force it to command in combination with other drives, whatever they might be.
I will come back to self-mastery later. For now it is important to know that you and I are a multiplicity of drives and that there is a political order that you can both discern and take action upon. In the next post, I will address a central problem (seemingly a contradiction) with Nietzsche’s contention that we can take action upon our drives. How can we do this when he also plainly states, as we shall see, that we cannot know most of our drives directly? Further, what are life-negating drives and life-affirming ones? A well-ordered soul, as Nietzsche did not hesitate to call it, should be dominated by life-affirming drives. We will see how this is possible.
Finally, we will address other aspects of Nietzsche’s psychology which include the cause and consequence of certain drives turning inward upon us, the interconnected nature of the drives with culture and society, and why the “greatest” soul is one with the most internal contradictions. Once again, Nietzsche does not believe inner harmony is the key to (higher) happiness. On the contrary, the act of overcoming challenges and resistance leads to genuine contentment, not a peaceful life. We will conclude with an examination of the ultimate psychological goal for Nietzsche, which is the transformation of suffering and resistance into a constant state of becoming in a manner that Nietzsche termed as giving “style” to your life.
Psychology dates back at least to ancient Egypt and Greece. As a proper discipline of study it remained under the umbrella of philosophy until 1879 when Wilhelm Wundt founded the first institution devoted exclusively to psychological research. The new field of science quickly became all the rage in Europe. Contrasting schools of psychology emerged in 1880’s with Sigmund Freud undertaking his pioneering research beginning in the 1890’s.
Friedrich Nietzsche began dabbling in psychology as early as the late-1860’s. As this blog attests, there are many avenues to Nietzsche’s philosophy. One of them is definitely psychological in nature. Psychology is, in fact, fundamental to Nietzsche’s philosophy. You cannot understand Nietzsche without understanding his perspectives on this subject. I am beginning 2020 with a series of posts devoted to Nietzsche’s view of human psychology, which, I believe, is a useful tool in self-understanding and continues to be relevant today.
In Beyond Good and Evil (1885) Nietzsche writes: “…once your ship has strayed onto this course: Well then! All right! Grit your teeth bravely! Open your eyes! Keep your hand at the helm! – we are going to be traveling beyond morality, and by daring to travel there we may in the process stifle or crush whatever remnant of morality we have left – but what of we matter! Never yet has a deeper world of insight been opened to bold travelers and adventurers; and the psychologist who makes this kind of ‘sacrifice’ may demand at least that psychology be recognized once again as queen of the sciences, which other sciences exist to serve and anticipate. For psychology has once again become the way to basic issues.” (BGE 23, Faber translation)
What is this “course” upon which our “ship” has supposedly “strayed”? What is this “deeper world of insight” taking us beyond good and evil? Nietzsche answers this earlier in BGE 23. Using his emphasis, it is the “evolutionary theory of the will to power.” By this he means: “A real physio-psychology must struggle with the unconscious resistances in the heart of the researcher, the ‘heart’ is working against it; a conscience that is still strong and hearty will be distressed and annoyed even by a theory of the reciprocal conditionality of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ instincts, which seems to be a kind of subtle immorality – and even more by a theory of the derivation of all good drives from bad ones.”
Thus Nietzsche places his theory of “drives” (as well as his concept of “morality”) at the heart of his psychological project, the “deeper insight” (revaluing morality) being rather disorienting. “But granted that a person takes the emotions of hatred, envy, greed, power hunger as conditions for living, crucial and fundamental to the universal economy of life and therefore in need of intensifying if life is to be intensified, he is also a person who suffers from such an orientation in judgment as if he were seasick.” (BGE 23)
So it is in spite of this “seasickness” that we must “keep our hand on the helm” and sail into a new and intense affirmation of life. A significant portion of this initial disorientation comes from the sheer novelty of going “beyond” traditional morality and redefining what is “good” and what is “evil”; but equally as disquieting is understanding the full nature of the “drives” themselves. From BGE 19, Nietzsche writes of “a multiplicity of feelings” deep within us calling the basic concept of who we are into question as revealed through the act of willing.
“…the will is not merely a complex of feelings and thoughts, is it above all an emotion, and in fact the emotion of command. What is called ‘freedom of the will’ is essentially the emotion of superiority felt towards the one who must obey: ‘I am free, “he” must obey.’ This consciousness lies in every will, as does also a tense alertness, a direct gaze concentrated on one thing alone, an unconditional assessment that ‘now we must have this and nothing else’, an inner certainty that obedience will follow, and everything else that goes along with the condition of giving commands. A person who wills: this person is commanding a Something in himself that obeys, or that he thinks is obeying.
“But let us now consider the strangest thing about the will, about this multifarious thing that the common people call by one word alone. In any given case, we both command and obey, when we obey we know feelings of coercion, pressure, oppression, resistance, and agitation that begin immediately after the act of will. On the other hand, we are in the habit of ignoring or overlooking division by means of the synthetic concept ’I’. Thus, a whole series of erroneous conclusions and therefore of false assessments of the will itself has been appended to willing in such a way that the person who wills now believes with complete faith that willing is enough for action…Thus the person willing adds to his pleasurable feeling as commander the pleasurable feelings of the successful executing instrument, the serviceable ‘underwill’ or under soul (our body after all is nothing but a social structure of many souls).” (BGE 19)
Nietzsche’s psychology is simultaneously a call to intimate authenticity by addressing yourself directly, “sailing beyond” the constraints of cultural approval, AND coming to terms with the fact that you are not one constant thing but, rather, a “multiplicity” of drives, “a multifarious thing.” In the section above, Nietzsche is particularly interested in how the drives express the will to power by competing and dominating one another. A person who ascertains their unique values as expressed by the naturally dominant drive or drives is a person who has taken a step closer to bringing order to their drives which, in turn, is essential for living a healthy life of affirmation. That is the destination where Nietzsche ultimately arrives.
Although, for reasons I have previously stated, I hesitate to place a lot of weight on writings in Nietzsche’s Nachlass (volumes of notebooks, including the collection of notes known as The Will to Power), this note seems clarifying with specific respect to the theory of drives: “The I is not the attitude of one being to several (drives, thoughts, etc.) but the ego is a plurality of personlike forces, of which now this one now that one stands in the foreground as ego and regards the others as a subject regards an influential and determining external world….Within ourselves we can also be egotistic or altruistic, hard-hearted, magnanimous, just, lenient, insincere, can cause pain or give pleasure: as such drives are in conflict, the feeling of the I is always strongest where the preponderance is.” (1880 note quoted by Parkes (1994), page 292; the first emphasis is by Parkes)
According to Thiele (1990), “In the spring of 1868, before the appearance of any of his philosophical works, Nietzsche wrote: ‘The concept of the whole does not lie in things, but in us. These unities that we name organisms are but again multiplicities. There are in reality no individuals, moreover individuals and organisms are nothing but abstractions’ (General Works, 1:414) He maintained this thesis throughout his life. The human being, the body, the soul, the subject, the individual, was proposed as a multiplicity. A note written in 1885 reads: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general?...My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity’ (WP 270).” (page 51)
What are these drives and how exactly do they work? Katsafanas (2016) offers several insights into the Nietzschean concept of the self as a multiplicity of drives. “Nietzsche argues that human beings possess drives expressed in 'hostility, cruelty, joy in persecuting, in attacking, in change, in destruction' (GM II.16)...drives have a definite quantity of force, and this force cannot be straightforwardly eliminated, but only restrained and redirected.” (page 57) It is important to note that you and I can act upon our otherwise “automated,” largely unconscious multiplicity. We can “restrain and redirect” certain drives which allows for, as we will see, “a well-ordered soul.”
Drives are active within you, independent of you to the extent that “you” would not exist without drives. A given drive is has its own, independent initiative and criteria for action: “...drives evaluate and interpret. For the affective orientation induced by a drive can be understood as an evaluative orientation.” (page 94) “Drives are not simply responses to external stimuli; on the contrary, drives seek to manifest themselves.” (page 99) Importantly here is the fact that drives are aggressive forces that produce “affects.” This becomes critical deeper into Nietzsche’s psychology.
“Drives need not be constant in the literal sense of being active at each moment; rather, they are constant in the sense that they arise, with some regularity, throughout the individual's life.” (page 100) “Drives are independent of external stimuli, and, once they have become active, they will seek discharge...Nietzsche tells us that the drive will seek outlets, seek objects on which to vent itself.” (page 101) Here you can see the mechanics of flux within the multiplicity (each drive independently seeks expression and dominance) as well as the single-minded nature of each drive.
“The aim of the drive is its characteristic form of activity. The sexual drive aims at sexual activity, the aggressive drive aims at aggressive activity. In order for a drive to be expressed, one needs an object. The drive itself is indifferent to the object; the drive simply seeks expression. So the aggressive drive will seek to vent itself on whatever object happens to be present...If an appropriate object is not present, the drive will seek expression on whatever object happens to be present.” (page 101) If denied a route of expression, a drive will find an alternate route to express itself. So drives do not necessarily manifest the same way every time, which further complicates understanding them.
“...when a drive is active it will induce a particular kind of orientation; it will induce an orientation that inclines the agent to take steps toward fulfilling the drive, by making it appear as if taking these steps is warranted by the situation at hand...a drive manifests itself by impacting the agent's rational capacities. And with that, we can begin to see something interesting: being moved by a drive and being moved by conscious thought are not distinct processes. Drives can move us by directing and influencing our conscious thought.” (page 103) Though drives are mostly unconscious, our conscious decisions are usually drives expressing themselves. Got that? The multiplicity of drives messes with your life, for better or for worse.
“Nietzsche claims that our actions are the products of a chaotic mix of largely non-conscious desires and drives. Our conscious thoughts are casually important, buffeted about by forces that we neither discern nor understand. Appearances of self-conscious decision are illusory or causally inert, mere symptoms of hidden processes. Thus, Nietzsche claims that when an agent decides to do something, the agent is analogous to a boat 'following the current.' which '”wills' to go that way because it – must’ (GS 360).” (page 135)
Our behavior is always a manifestation of our dominant drive(s). For Nietzschean psychology, you have very little autonomy from your inner drives. But it is possible to understand them better and to take greater control over them. Not everyone is capable of this and, for many, their drives control them all their lives (which is why it is possible for algorithms to predict and control consumer behavior). But for others, the “free spirits,” “Ubermensch” (overmen) and “higher” persons of “the future,” it is possible to apply your understanding of your drives in such a way as to “orchestrate” and/or “command” them to the affirmative benefit of your life.
So, your behavior is an expression of your most dominant drives. Put another way, your misery in life is at the discord of multiple dominant drives that won’t cooperate. The hierarchy at which this inner order or chaos expresses itself is unlike anything else in the world, but it is most like human politics. Drives dominate or cooperate in a relationship that most resembles a political order.
According to Clark and Dudrick (2012): “The dominant drives in the political order of drives – those that have the authority to speak for the whole commonwealth – command. These are the drives whose high political ranking constitutes a person’s most basic commitments. The obeying drives are those that carry out the command, the dispositions to basic actions, we might say, as well perhaps as the subversive drives that tempt the person away from acting on her values…Nietzsche’s equation of ‘underwills’ and ‘under-souls’ implies that the will is the soul. Because […] Nietzsche takes the soul to be the ‘political structure of drives and affects’ (BGE 12), a structure of legitimacy and authority, not simply strength, this confirms […] that the parts of the will are the drives and that structure that allows them to form the will is political.” (page 188)
“The upshot is that to have freedom of the will is to be a well-constructed and happy commonwealth of drives, one in which the drives with political authority command and are obeyed by the drives that actually do the work. The politically superior drives rightly take credit for the work done by the other drives, because it would not have been done in the circumstances if they had commanded it.” (page 189)
While there is a “political order to the drives” there is also a “commonwealth.” So not only must certain drives (at times, remember the multiplicity is in near constant flux) dominate all others but they must (at times) work together, forming, if you will, “alliances” where several drives might work in unison to control all the others. This should not imply any sort of inner “harmony,” however. For Nietzsche’s psychology, harmony or even “inner peace” is not a desired psychological goal. Quite the opposite, actually. This is an excellent example of essential Nietzsche revaluation of a “value.”
Katsafanas writes: “Nietzsche tells us that some agents are disunified loci of forces, whereas other agents are unified. Thus, Nietzsche argues that agents are typically multiple and fragmented. He notes that 'human beings have in their bodies the heritage of multiple origins, that is, opposite, and often not merely opposite, drives and value standards that fight each other and rarely permit each other any rest' (BGE 224).” (page 168)
The drives, even when one or more dominate, remain dynamic and in need of constant vigilance (for “higher” persons who are even capable of this). In Nietzsche’s psychology, you do not “discover” who you are, rather you discover how you are and the “who” emerges from this inquiry itself. This is what Nietzsche intended with his expression “Become Who You Are.” This means we should develop routine habits of monitoring our behavior down to the mundane level. Untended (unobserved) drives are like uncultivated fields. They are soon overgrown with useless weeds and bear little harvest. Undesirable drives that go untended can become "monsters" due to their unchecked bid for power.
In “The Wanderer and His Shadow” addition (1880) to Human, All Too Human (1878) Nietzsche writes: “Through the neglect of the small facts, through lack of self-observation and observation of those who are to be brought up, it is you yourselves who first allowed the passions to develop into such monsters that you are overcome by fear at the word ‘passion’! It is up to you, as it is up to us, to /take from/ the passions their terrible character and thus prevent them from becoming devastating torrents.” (WS 37)
Just as important, a drive that achieves dominance is never satiated, which is one reason we so often seem unfulfilled by our achievements or consumption of our desires. Katsafanas again: “The drive is not satisfied by the attainment of its object; rather, the drive motivates us to continue expressing its characteristic form of activity. So our actions don't have the motivational structure that we expect. We think we seek determinate ends and will be satisfied by their attainment; instead, we seek only processes of drive-expression and find attainment of ends at best temporarily satisfying.” (page 258) (As an aside, this is actually an excellent summary of Emptiness as well.)
Inner peace is simply a temporary effect (psychologically an “affect”) and always fleeting in “higher” individuals because the true goal is not “self-realization.” Rather, it is to attain a constant state of “becoming.” “Become who you are” is a perpetual process given the ever fluctuating nature of the multiplicity. While a “higher” person may experience inner harmony just as so many “lower” persons do, the experience itself has little to do with true happiness and is useful only to the extent that it allows the individual to flourish according to their orchestrated values. In addition to being a multiplicity, Nietzsche’s psychology sees “modern souls” as existing in a state of chaos.
In BGE 224, it seems as if Nietzsche could be describing today’s world: “…this historical sense, which we Europeans claim as if it were distinctively ours, has come at the result of an enchanting, mad /semi-barbarity/ into which Europe has been plunged by the democratic intermingling of classes and races – only the nineteenth century knows this sense, our sixth sense. Because of such mixing, our ‘modern souls’ are now infused with the past history of every form and way of life, with cultures that previously existed separately close by one another or on top of one another – our instincts are now running backwards in every direction, we are ourselves a kind of chaos.”
Note that the chaos is not necessarily natural to us. In the sense just articulated, chaos is only brought about by the democratization of European society. Admittedly, this is a rather naïve and antiquated thing for Nietzsche to refer to, but he was mostly a man of time even if he was far ahead of his time in some ways. Nietzsche detested democracy, the rule of “the herd.” It only leads to mass resentment and increases the power of those who are most resentful. Witness our current state of democracy and I think you will see that he is correct as far as that goes. Nietzsche felt that this resentment was a source of nihilistic decay and decadence in society and it was a social system that needed to be overcome. But that is not our topic here. Suffice it to say that it could just as easily be social media and the internet, for example, creating so much chaos today as democracy did to 19th century values.
In terms of his psychology we need only to be concerned with our internal “chaos” in relation to the dominance and alliances of the political order of drives. The workings of our psychology are not “democratic” at all. Rather, they are a seething multiplicity of complementing and competing drives, which are not equal or fair or just or even unfair or unjust. Drives are basically neutral, each one just wants to fully express itself. Drives don’t “try” to “cause” anything. Their only goal is expression, that’s all. Judgments of “motive” or “intent” do not apply to drives. One of Nietzsche’s major points is that the brain does not naturally “act” morally at all. Each drive strives for power in its own way. All drives seek privilege. The chaos of “modern souls” is curable, however, through a healthy political order of drives.
Another characteristic of the “higher” persons in Nietzsche’s psychology is that they are passionate and intense people. Their drives are often ravenous and competitive. Commanding or orchestrating them requires great skill and strength of character. It may have some “romanticism” in it, since Nietzsche was a man of the Romantic Era, but the more passionate the person (the multiplicity), the greater the potential for becoming. Life is meant to be lived intensely, not laid back (another revaluation). This means different things to different multiplicities, of course. For some it would be sexually. But for others it will be intellectually, or religiously, or you name it.
In Daybreak (1881), Nietzsche writes about the “vehemence” (intensity) of certain drives within each of us. Recall that first one, then another drive will dominate or form alliances with other varying drives, hopefully but not necessarily under your control. “…that one desires to combat the vehemence of a drive at all, however, does not stand within our own power…What is clearly the case is that in this entire procedure our intellect is only the blind instrument of another drive which is a rival of the drive whose vehemence is tormenting us: whether it be a drive to restfulness, of the fear of disgrace and evil consequences, or love. While ‘we’ believe we are complaining about the vehemence of a drive, at bottom it is one drive which is complaining about another…” (D 109)
Quite clearly, Nietzsche (agreeing with Buddhist teaching and the findings of recent neuroscience) discerns that the self (what we call “I”) is “a synthetic concept,” an illusion, a fiction – it does not exist as a fixed, singular agent. In the passage just quoted Nietzsche refers to himself and to the reader as each being a “we.” You and I are not “somebody” but rather a multitude of drives, each competing (and “complaining”) with the others as they jockey for dominance, which is to say the expression of your authentic values, your behavior in the world.
Drives are innumerable. But Nietzsche wrote of several (without claiming to name them all). In his writings he mentions the art drive, truth drive, value drive, aggression drive, sex drive (the most obvious one), cruelty drive, possession drive, power drive, creation drive, and knowledge drive. Essentially, drives are the behaviors and characteristics of human behavior in their entirety. You could easily pick out others, the consumption drive, clean drive, symmetry drive, pleasure drive, optimistic drive, melancholy drive, etc.
After we understand generally what drives are and why they literally constitute each of us, the next things to appreciate about Nietzsche’s psychology are that 1) bringing order to the drives is, indeed, a political process between the drives themselves and that 2) the collection of drives compose the human soul. Nietzsche declared “God is dead” but, ironically again, he nevertheless welcomed the idea of a human “soul” as useful, with a twist, of course.
“One should not get rid of ‘the soul,’ Nietzsche insisted, for it is ‘one of the oldest and most venerable hypotheses.’ ‘But the road to new forms and refinements of the soul-hypothesis stands open’ and invites ‘such conceptions as “mortal soul” and “soul as multiplicity of subject’ and ‘soul as social structure of the drives and emotions’” (BGE 12). Here Nietzsche revealed the speculative core of his philosophical enterprise. Not unlike Plato, we would clothe his philosophy in personal attire. For the language that best facilitates the description and analysis of the soul is political. The world of politics serves as a conceptual and terminological resource of the ‘reader of souls.’ Nietzsche observed that organization, cooperation, and patterns of domination – in short, politics – allowed pluralities to bear the appearance of unities (WP 303).” (Thiele, page 52)
This defines the general nature of the chaos and how it can be orchestrated into some sort of unity. This unity is basically who we think we are. “The multiple soul is a conglomerate of passions, desires, affects, forces, feelings, emotions, drives, and instincts. In turn, these variously named molecules of human motivation coalesced to form dispositions or character. Still, Nietzsche did not pretend to have discovered or explained the atomic structure of the human soul. He claimed only to observe its effects.” (page 54) That behavioral effects (“affects”) are observable is, once again, a major point, as I will show.
Nietzsche’s psychology is fundamentally about “bringing order out of chaos” to paraphrase one of his more famous quotes. You are a multiplicity of complementing and competing drives and you must master them into a political order of dominance when necessary and alliance when necessary. Otherwise, you will be mastered by them in a chaos of aggressive, uncontrolled drives.
The vast majority of people (“the herd”) are incapable of mastering their drives or even noticing them with sufficient awareness. They are clueless and their drives run amuck, exploitable, for example, by Function (making consumerism possible, for example). Only “higher” individuals can master their drives. Self-mastery is not only about figuring out your drives (your ambitions, desires, passions), it is equally knowing how to orchestrate the drives into a hierarchy that most resembles a political order of dominance and cooperation, knowing when to allow one drive to assert itself and when to force it to command in combination with other drives, whatever they might be.
I will come back to self-mastery later. For now it is important to know that you and I are a multiplicity of drives and that there is a political order that you can both discern and take action upon. In the next post, I will address a central problem (seemingly a contradiction) with Nietzsche’s contention that we can take action upon our drives. How can we do this when he also plainly states, as we shall see, that we cannot know most of our drives directly? Further, what are life-negating drives and life-affirming ones? A well-ordered soul, as Nietzsche did not hesitate to call it, should be dominated by life-affirming drives. We will see how this is possible.
Finally, we will address other aspects of Nietzsche’s psychology which include the cause and consequence of certain drives turning inward upon us, the interconnected nature of the drives with culture and society, and why the “greatest” soul is one with the most internal contradictions. Once again, Nietzsche does not believe inner harmony is the key to (higher) happiness. On the contrary, the act of overcoming challenges and resistance leads to genuine contentment, not a peaceful life. We will conclude with an examination of the ultimate psychological goal for Nietzsche, which is the transformation of suffering and resistance into a constant state of becoming in a manner that Nietzsche termed as giving “style” to your life.
Comments